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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 13, Issue 2, Article 2 (Dec., 2012) |
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationships between personal approach goals and students’ perceptions about their parents’ achievement goals in science. Firstly, we investigated the relationship between perceived parents’ mastery and performance approach goals emphases and students’ personal achievement goals. The results suggested an interaction between perceived parents’ mastery approach goal emphasis and perceived parents’ performance approach goal emphasis on students’ adoption of mastery approach goals. This finding implied that students who perceive high parent mastery approach goal emphasis and high performance approach goal emphasis tend to adopt personal mastery approach goals at the highest levels. In other words, students who think that self-improvement in science is important for their parents, as well as demonstrating their ability to other people, tend to study for learning new things, or improving their knowledge in science. This finding is consistent with the related literature suggesting that high mastery/high performance approach contextual goals are more facilitative for students and related to positive outcomes (Barron & Harackiewicz, 2001; Elliot & Church, 1997; Linnenbrink, 2005; Turner, Meyer, Midgley,& Patrick, 2003).
Considering the influence of perceived parents’ emphasized goals on students’ performance approach goals, the results indicated that students tend to adopt performance approach goals if they think that being a top student is important for their parents. Consistent with the previous research, the findings suggest that home environment has an important role in terms of students’ personal achievement goals in science. Parents can direct students to adopt either mastery approach goals by focusing on learning new things and improving knowledge or performance approach goals by comparing their children with peers in science classes (Friedel, Hruda,& Midgley, 2001; Gonida, Voulala, & Kiosseoglou, 2009; Kim, Schallert & Kim, 2010).
Overall, the results suggest that parents have an important role in seventh grade students’ reasons for engaging in science activities and tasks. Even though the influence of peers is expected to be stronger for this age group (Midgley, Feldlaufer, & Eccles, 1989), the significant relationship found between parents’ and students goal emphasis may have important educational implications: According to the results, students who perceive achievement goals from their parents at higher levels are more likely to adopt mastery approach goals. Therefore it is suggest that perceived parent approach goals emphases should be at high levels. To be able to achieve this, parents can engage in more dialogue with their children about their schooling and academic goals in science classes. They can emphasize to their children that demonstrating a good performance and getting high grades as well as showing progress and learning the course material deeply in science is important. At this point it may be essential that parents encourage their children to achieve good grades and become a good student mainly through self-improvement rather than making normative comparisons about abilities. Accordingly, they should show efforts to create a mastery approach oriented home environment by focusing on their children’s self-improvement in science. They should encourage their children to study in an attempt to learn and understand science concepts rather than just getting good grades without meaningful learning. Besides, because competition for improvement but not for performance is helpful for students, parents can encourage their children to compete with their peers to learning new thing and, improving their skills in science (Linnenbrink, 2005). In order to achieve this end, programs can be developed to increase parents’ awareness about importance of students’ personal achievement goals in their academic performance and to help parents create home environments conducive to development of mastery approach goals which are significantly linked to adaptive outcomes such as higher levels of metacognitive awareness and deeper processing of information (Elliot & McGregor, 2001; Pintrich, 2000). In addition, because perceived parents’ goals emphases are found to be significant predictors of students’ personal achievement goals in science, it is important to consider teachers’ goal emphases in science classes. Indeed, relevant literature demonstrated that students’ personal achievement goals are influenced by perceived teachers goal emphases (Kaplan & Maehr, 1999; Middleton, Gheen, Hruda, Middletone, & Midgley, 2000; Roeser, Midgley, & Urdan, 1996). Accordingly, future studies can examine how students’ personal achievement goals, perceived parents’ goals emphasis, and perceived teacher goal emphasis interact with each other. Such studies can shed light into what happens if there is conflict in parents’ and teachers’ goal emphases.
Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research
There are some limitations of the present study that need to be addressed in future studies: Firstly, it is a cross sectional study, therefore the observed relationships, do not imply cause and effect relationships. Secondly, this study examined the relationships between students’ personal achievement goals and their perceived parents’ goal emphasis only in science domain. Additionally, participants of the study were restricted to 7th grade Turkish students. So, there is a need for future studies in different domains and in different cultures in order to demonstrate generalizability of the current findings. Besides, longitudinal studies can be conducted to determine whether the observed relationships show some differences across ages and to examine possible cause and effect relations. Accordingly, further studies can examine how interaction between perceived parents’ goal emphases and personal achievement goals in science at different grade levels influences students’ career choices and academic majors in their future. In addition such longitudinal studies can shed light into the interactive goal patterns more conducive to the development of scientifically literate individuals who poses a deep understanding of scientific knowledge, interpret and reflect on the scientific knowledge and produce scientific evidences by actively engaging in science activities and problems. Finally, this study relies only on self-report data. Thus, it is suggested that both quantitative and qualitative data are collected in future studies to validate the findings of the present study.
